Peter Swerling

Who was Peter Swerling?

Peter Swerling was one of the most influential radar theoreticians in the second half of the 20th century. He is best known for the class of statistically "fluctuating target" scattering models he developed at the RAND Corporation in the early 1950s to characterize the performance of pulsed radar systems, referred to as Swerling Target I, II, III, and IV in the literature of radar. He also made significant contributions to the optimal estimation of orbits and trajectories of satellites and missiles, later refined by Rudolph Kalman as the Kalman filter.